Hi, Tumblr. It’s Tumblr. We’re working on some things that we want to share with you.
AI companies are acquiring content across the internet for a variety of purposes in all sorts of ways. There are currently very few regulations giving individuals control over how their content is used by AI platforms. Proposed regulations around the world, like the European Union’s AI Act, would give individuals more control over whether and how their content is utilized by this emerging technology. We support this right regardless of geographic location, so we’re releasing a toggle to opt out of sharing content from your public blogs with third parties, including AI platforms that use this content for model training. We’re also working with partners to ensure you have as much control as possible regarding what content is used.
Here are the important details:
We already discourage AI crawlers from gathering content from Tumblr and will continue to do so, save for those with which we partner.
We want to represent all of you on Tumblr and ensure that protections are in place for how your content is used. We are committed to making sure our partners respect those decisions.
To opt out of sharing your public blogs’ content with third parties, visit each of your public blogs’ blog settings via the web interface and toggle on the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.
For instructions on how to opt out using the latest version of the app, please visit this Help Center doc.
Please note: If you’ve already chosen to discourage search crawling of your blog in your settings, we’ve automatically enabled the “Prevent third-party sharing” option.
If you have concerns, please read through the Help Center doc linked above and contact us via Support if you still have questions.
@staff, given the 404 media post, this PR announcement you had prepared for tomorrow is very clearly out of date, and I would just remove the post and write something else.
In the post, you talk about AI crawlers like if it was something you are defending your users against. A external actor that may get to tumblr public posts and use them for nefarious purposes.
What you don't talk about is about AUTOMATTIC SELLING THAT DATA TO THE COMPANIES THAT USE THOSE CRAWLERS, SO THEY DON'T EVEN NEED TO SCRAPE THE PUBLIC TUMBLR BLOGS.
Why are you even talking about crawlers when it has just been published that you are actively and proactively sending the data straight to their servers?
This is no sense. At the very least, delete this post and write something addressing the real issue.
